These days, people are being exposed to the risk of various liver diseases due to excessive stress, drinking, smoking, environmental pollution, viruses, etc. Typical liver diseases include liver cirrhosis, alcoholic liver cirrhosis, fatty liver, toxipathic liver diseases, acute and chronic hepatitis, etc. Of these, hepatitis is a serious disease that spreads worldwide and is infectious at a low degree. Medical practitioners presume that 70-80% of liver cirrhosis and liver cancer patients are due to the worse of chronic hepatitis.
Particularly, hepatitis B virus (HBV) is a member of the Hepadnaviridae family which infects the human body and has an incubation period of about 60-110 days, and 90-95% of patients with hepatitis B virus completely recover from hepatitis B after various clinical stages. However, in the case of patients who did not recover from hepatitis B infection, HBV DNA is assimilated into the genomic DNA of human liver cells to cause chronic active hepatitis, liver cirrhosis, liver cancer and the like. Chronic hepatitis caused by HBV causes chronic viral infections, lymphoma diseases and chronic renal failure, like other diseases. Thus, chronic hepatitis is regarded as a highly lethal disease that develops into a more potent disease, leading to patient's death.
Thus, in order to treat viral hepatitis, various methods employing interferon, nucleic acid derivatives or immune modulators have been attempted. However, interferon-α reported to have a therapeutic effect did not show a continuous inhibitory effect, and patients caused by mother-to-infant vertical transmission of hepatitis virus shows resistance to interferon-α. Also, a drug that can completely cure hepatitis has not yet been developed, and in current therapy for hepatitis, an antiviral drug is continuously administered to prevent hepatitis from developing into a serious liver disease. However, it was reported that antiviral drugs cause viral mutations that induce resistance to the drugs and makes the drug effect impotent.
Thus, a current method for treating hepatitis is a passive method that inhibits the proliferation of virus to prevent hepatitis from developing into a serious liver disease, and a method of directly treating hepatitis by, for example, forming an antibody, has not yet been reported. Therefore, it has been required to develop a novel method for preventing and treating hepatitis.
Accordingly, the present inventors have made many efforts to develop a natural material-derived composition having excellent effects on the prevention and treatment of liver diseases, including hepatitis. As a result, the present inventors have found that a homogeneous cell line derived from the cambium of Panax ginseng, including wild ginseng or ginseng, a lysate thereof, an extract thereof and a culture thereof have excellent effects on the prevention and treatment of liver diseases, thereby completing the present invention.